Channel Management Software

Direct selling has become a thing of the past. Today’s eCommerce heavily relies on multi-channels, meaning your brand face is presented to customers through other parties than you. Although initially perceived as a concern for some, companies acknowledged the need and started using channel management software to handle this challenge. Capterra’s definition of “channel management software” explains how it works: “It allows companies to streamline their distribution and sales efforts by organizing clients into specific segments and keeping track of marketing outreach and buying patterns.”

In the B2B context, companies use channel management software to monitor and manage anything about their channel. This includes tracking leads, real-time engagement with all members, direct sales, observing the pipeline, and many other functions. Companies could handle complex B2B relationships with channel management software and specific automation. When automation was in, the storyline started from the customer, finding its way through the channel to the brand itself. This needed optimization to establish consistency. Consistency is an important keyword in the brand loyalty context, and we can achieve it through several means. We use loyalty strategies to achieve it; however, we need to understand the nature of a channel first.

Recognizing Your Channel

As much as the whole concept might imply a top-down mechanism, it is larger than it seems. It is designed to provide the brand owner with ease in managing everyone and to respond to your partners candidly. Moreover, there is another challenge channel managers need to address here. Competition for acquiring customers aside, channel partnerships also had their share of the competitive climate. You constantly need to find ways to foster and empower your partners. They may want to choose other vendors if they believe you are unwilling to listen.

Therefore, there is a need to provide incentives to maintain your existing channel as well as to recruit new partnerships. Incentives work in many cases, including brand education and developing social awareness. Collecting data from across your channel management software is crucial for reaching such a level. Data in this context refers to all sorts of involvement your partners exhibit. However, they are only sometimes reflected explicitly on the software, meaning they need interpretation. At this point, loyalty additions serve as transcribers to address any interaction that would bring financial and emotional gain. Success lies in many realms, but B2B engagement is a prominent one worth digging deeper into.

Covering the Engagement Aspect 

Managing the emotional part, which is not tangible, like finances, is difficult. Yet, Apex Loyalty offers smart measures to decipher all sorts of data and transform them into engagement patterns. We use B2B engagement metrics to understand engagement levels and enhance them. We utilize enrollment, redemption, active engagement, point accumulation, and content consumption rates based on our multiple-measure approach to establish the most flexible mechanism possible. Given the abundant nature of B2B channels, data is endless. In short, you have to filter it to make sense to your partners through reports, campaigns, visuals, and content. With Apex Loyalty’s dynamic rules, you can build engagement offerings within a strategy in a timely and scalable manner.

Adding a fun taste to it, we offer various engagement and gamification elements that you can integrate into these actions. Gamification features are especially noteworthy in creating a community feel within the channel management software. It makes certain actions feel easy and fun while rewarding your partners and even training them in a seamless way that does not feel tedious. The projects in which we used these feature, in other words, our success stories and feature exceptional cases where companies achieved their objectives for better engagement within their channels.

Other Apex Loyalty Highlights

We defined Apex Loyalty’s core features as channel loyalty, customer and partner engagement and incentive automation. These components constitute a strong backbone that any company from any industry can utilize flexibly. It opens creative ways to increase sales and educate and train your channel management software.

Another highlight is that Apex Loyalty offers all of these in a user-friendly manner. Our drag-and-drop design wizard is another loyalty element since members can design their platform easily with it. With the user-friendly manager panels, they will be eager to interact daily, regardless of everyday hassles. Rendering engagement easy and natural, Apex Loyalty provides a simple yet straightforward and comprehensive addition to your channel management efforts.

You can read our previous post on https://www.apexloyalty.com/how-does-apex-loyalty-work-for-sales-team/